The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

Most of the people affected may never know about their parentage, but these days, many are stumbling into the truth after AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests.

  • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    It is the Atlantic to be fair so you might not be missing much. This from a magazine that endorsed the Shakespeare conspiracy repeatedly.

    If you can lie about one thing, you can lie about two…

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        That he didn’t write the plays and presumably the poems. It’s basically flat earthers for the literature. The Atlantic ran a piece advocating for it and then ran two other pieces about how great they were for running the original piece.